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Robert Berkeley 00:05  

Welcome once again to Inside Jobs Podcast, where we delve deep into the operations and leadership of in-house agencies and hear the backstory of some of the amazing people who lead them. My name's Robert Berkeley, and today we are joined by Donovan Stohlberg, director of the internal creative agency at Securian Financial.  

 

Donovan's journey from weaving dreams on a theater stage to an actual dream role in corporate marketing allows him to have blended a unique mix of creative and strategic thinking. Now it's brought to you by the leading trade association for in-house agencies. I have EKCS, whose production support is harnessed by in-house agencies around the world.  

 

Today, we’re going to explore how Donovan’s artistic background influences his leadership, the challenges and triumphs of managing an in-house agency, and his vision for the future of marketing at Securian Financial.  

 

Donovan, it's an absolute pleasure and an honor to have you join us today and share your story with us. Welcome to Inside Jobs.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 01:01  

Thank you so much, Robert. It's such a blast to be here with you.  

 

Robert Berkeley 01:04  

So welcome, Donovan. It’s great to have you join us with Inside Jobs. Tell us a little bit about Securian Financial and what you’re doing there at present, and then we’ll jump in the wayback machine and explore how you got there.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 01:13  

Securian Financial is a mid-sized company in the Midwest, and they focus on a number of B2C audiences, B2B audiences, and they really specialize in life insurance with a number of other products in the insurance industry. Been around for about 140 years, but really, we’ve been focusing lately on the marketing side of things.  

 

Robert Berkeley 01:34  

Okay, so your role is marketing to other businesses, marketing to consumers, or both?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 01:39  

Yeah, we do both. So whether it’s a B2B2C or a B2B, that’s really the place we play.  

 

Robert Berkeley 01:45  

Okay. All right, so that sounds like quite a big role. I know you’ve got millions of clients that you’ve already got on board and no doubt a very competitive marketplace trying to attract more. So I imagine you got your work cut out there, Donovan.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 01:58  

Yes, absolutely, we do. I lead the in-house agency team, and it’s set up as your regular creative team with many of the functions that people are familiar with. You have your graphic design and production teams, your digital design teams, digital support, copywriters, print production, and then we have a dotted line to our project management team and operations. And obviously, we partner very closely with brand and our user experience team.  

 

So as a part of marketing, we have this overall, about 100-plus folks on the team. And then we have that 20 to 25 to 30 associates in our particular in-house team.  

 

Robert Berkeley 02:33  

Okay, and is the in-house the lead creative, or do you work with external creative agencies?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 02:37  

We have a handful of partners that we work with occasionally, but for the most part, 90% of the time, we do a lot of the creative work in-house.  

 

Robert Berkeley 02:46  

Does that mean that there’s strategic creative coming out of that team as well then?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 02:50  

Yes, there is, which is the fun part of it. And it was part of the journey that we were on as we built out the function.  

 

Robert Berkeley 02:56  

Now, this is a journey I know many of our listeners would want to hear about, but you’re actually a thespian, and that’s where you started. So we’ve got to go on that journey, man. So you started off wanting to tread the boards, and now you’re treading the boardrooms of financial services. Thank you. I didn’t even rehearse that. That just came straight out there. I might have elevated you to the board, though, at that point.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 03:16  

So it’s funny, I had a mentor once who said, you know, on the backside of your career or your life, or as things go by, your life is this beautifully constructed journey and story of destiny where each decision led to the next one. However, when you’re in the middle of all of it, it might feel like absolute chaos.  

 

So it’s an interesting journey that I’ve had from starting in a creative space. When I was real young, I was very interested in—I’m an 80s movie guy—so it was Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future. Just loved movies and the storytelling that goes with it.  

 

Robert Berkeley 03:55  

But you weren’t growing up in Hollywood. You were growing up in the Twin Cities, right?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 03:59  

Correct. The Minneapolis–St. Paul area. So probably far removed from that. However, I still loved it and was in school productions, involved with music and piano and saxophone, and then did a garage band.  

 

My father, too, was an editor of a local weekly newspaper. So it’s funny how you set these foundations in life that make a lot of sense later on, but at the time, you’re just kind of doing your thing.  

 

Robert Berkeley 04:23  

Really keen to know—how did that theater thing transmogrify into something more related to marketing, shall we say?  

 

Robert Berkeley 04:23  

To know how did that theater thing transmogrified into something more related to marketing, shall we say?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 04:29  

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you go off to college and you have to get a real job. So while I was there, I was a chem major for all of six weeks and thought, well, this isn’t for me and just started taking classes I liked, and sure enough, a couple of theater classes. And then there were some communication classes and then some marketing classes. I started delving into that space and realized I enjoyed it. I thought it was great, but it’s not a real job. You can’t do anything with this. So again, all right, fine, get done, and I’ll get a real job, which I did.  

 

Robert Berkeley 05:00  

So what happened then from college? What did you leave college with, and what did you go into?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 05:04  

Yeah, I left and got a customer service representative job at a national healthcare company and learned that wasn’t for me. So this is where you have this plan in life, and it’s great that you have it and go down that route, but you have to pivot and make decisions.  

 

Robert Berkeley 05:20  

Is that a call center? Basically, you were in?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 05:22  

Correct, correct.  

 

Robert Berkeley 05:23  

So you went into calls. Go on.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 05:25  

Great experience. I learned a lot being there but knew it wasn’t for me. So I went back to college and thought, well, I’ll get a teaching degree. And then I could probably teach theater, which would be great. And so I started class.  

 

Robert Berkeley 05:40  

You went back to thinking about theater. Oh, okay.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 05:42  

On a lark. Just started being in shows, getting interested and involved with the people and the department. And as it turned out, I got my education degree. And they said, you know what, we have this opening for our MFA program or Master of Fine Arts in theater. Would you be interested? Because you could parlay that into your education. I’m like, okay, that makes total sense. I’m going to do that. And of course, I’ll use this when I’m teaching.  

 

So then I got into the program for two years, two and a half years. Acting, directing, producing. That’s where I started writing my own shows, getting involved on the stage, and doing internships at casting agencies. I thought, okay, now I know what I want to do. I got a plan, and it’s all set up and ready to go.  

 

Robert Berkeley 06:27  

And then how old were you at this point?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 06:29  

Yeah, I know it sounds like, my gosh, what are you, like 48? And it’s like, no, no, at this time, I was only 25 or 26.  

 

Robert Berkeley 06:36  

Well, but you do sound like a 25- or 26-year-old who is deeply conflicted by what they want to do and what they think they ought to do.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 06:43  

Yes, at this point, you unfortunately also have that side saying, hey, this is what you really want to do. So at that point, I got the degree, and then I was set up for the next steps.  

 

So I started a production company where we wrote plays and musicals, did some of these in partnership with other organizations, and did some on our own. That’s what I really ended up liking—not so much the acting part of it, but the producing, the directing, building those stories. It goes back to my love of movies, learning those key elements of what’s important when putting together a production.  

 

Robert Berkeley 07:21  

I find this fascinating because so many people leave college thinking they just need to get on with it, or even they go into college thinking they’re in a rush. And what you’re saying, perhaps between the lines, is no, you can take your time to figure it out, and you can take your time to find the route you want to take.  

 

So at the age of what, you said 25, 26, was it around then that you thought, you know, actually, I need to start earning a living in a way that’s sustainable? Or did you pivot again back to marketing?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 07:50  

I guess I taught for a couple of years, which was great, and that allowed me to have time to write shows and do productions. But then I was doing freelance writing.  

 

People always ask me, how did you shift from what you were doing into the finance space? Through freelance writing, I started doing some marketing communications for The Hartford, another insurance company. I started to learn aspects of the finance world. It was like, okay, great, I can do this other show.  

 

Essentially, I had a job to fund my theater addiction. And through that, I had the big jump that brought all my worlds together—one of my dream jobs—running a theater. So I picked up everything and moved out west, where I was running a theater.  

 

My official title was marketing and development director. However, it was a smaller company, obviously, so you did everything—whether it was fundraising, custodial work, or even shoveling if needed. I learned all aspects of marketing because...  

 

Robert Berkeley 08:58  

You had to play counting the pennies as they came in and counting the pennies as they went out.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 09:01  

Absolutely, yeah. You had to have your fingers in everything.  

 

It was a great experience—PR, media buying, making ads for television. Very grassroots, pinching pennies, doing what you could with them, but I got to play in everything. And I really loved that.  

 

So it was great. I had a dream job. Everything was set up.  

 

Except at the time, I started to realize I wanted to maybe start a family. And I saw that the theater world isn’t always the best situation for that. When you’re out till 2 a.m. building sets or getting the cast ready, it’s something that makes you think, maybe we’ll have to shift and do something else.  

 

Robert Berkeley 09:44  

So clearly your partner wasn’t from the theater world then.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 09:47  

She was, which was great. So she understood all this. But it was a decision we made together, so that brought us back and landed a gig at Ameriprise Financial. But now with that theater background, the marketing background, the storytelling background, it played really well into shifting into that marketing space where I did product marketing for Ameriprise Financial.  

 

Robert Berkeley 10:09  

So you would frame, or you’d be able to frame what you wanted to, how you wanted to address the market from the point of view of, as you say, storytelling and convincingly.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 10:18  

Yeah.  

 

Robert Berkeley 10:19  

And you started out as a copywriter and moved your way kind of up. Then after that, it became a sort of more or less traditional career path from there.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 10:26  

Yeah, at that point, then it was stepping in, starting to understand strategy, building marketing assets. And at this time, too, it’s really when data was starting to be a big part of marketing. So I got to play in the data and analytics area, which is fine because what I always joke about is like, oh, back in those days, you actually got an Excel spreadsheet and you had to read all of those numbers and actually pull that out. Where today we have great tools that do that for you. But it was a great time.  

 

Robert Berkeley 10:52  

Are you good with numbers? Naturally? Is that something that you kind of… you’ve been able to harness?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 10:58  

Anyway, along the way, I have become good with numbers, understanding budgets and watching things like that. But as it pertains to marketing, yeah, it’s like you can pick that up and start to understand how they’re all connected. So there just happened to be this opening at a little company called Securian Financial. So I went and interviewed, and as I was having the conversations, I started to realize, oh, this company has so much potential and there are things they can do, and they’re probably going to shift the way that they’re doing their work in the next—at the time, I said five to ten years—and it’d be really exciting to be a part of that.  

 

Because at that theater level, it was a very small company, so you’re doing everything. Ameriprise is a much larger company—you’re very specialized. This sort of was the Goldilocks: it’s just right. So you have the opportunity to really shift and have conversations about how you want to have a vision for the company or what you want to do, or those changes you want to make—you can make them faster.  

 

So I jumped in that role. And at the time, it was corporate communications, also corporate marketing and, again, some of that creative team. And I was working there and really learning all the aspects of the company, which was great. And then, instead of five to ten years, they made changes in three years. And so about three years later, they said, we’re going to redo all of this, and we’re going to centralize the marketing departments, and we’re going to split up and have formal corporate communications, formal corporate marketing, and a formal creative team. And Donovan, you’re going to lead that creative team.  

 

So that was finally how I landed in the role that I have now. And what was great about it is because I had product marketing experience and I had the corporate comms and the corporate marketing. As we’re building things from a creative standpoint, I get the perspective of all of these different teams and what they’re looking for. So it just brings a nice balance to understanding what they’re really asking for, or to ask the right questions if you don’t understand it, or to have an insight into the different audiences and how you have to connect with them. And that was the part that was great about it.  

 

Robert Berkeley 12:58  

But you had a management role there. Often, I speak to people on Inside Jobs who’ve come through in traditional agencies, and they become account directors or sometimes creative leaders within agencies. But they’ve seen and lived that infrastructure for a long time. Then they’ve worked—perhaps they’ve gone into in-house agencies—and they’ve lived and breathed that structure for a long time. But you had a confidence about how you were going to shape this up. How did you know what to do? To put it bluntly, yeah.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 13:23  

So there’s a couple of things that helped out at the theater. Working with external agencies quite often, you get a sense of how it all works. So that, at least from a structure and operational standpoint, you start to have that vision of how things could work. I also subtly dove deep into networking and finding organizations where you can meet people to ask all these questions and to understand—hey, how do you do this? How do you do that? What do you do about these types of things?  

 

And then the third thing is we took the time to step back and worked with a company that helped us set it up and try to understand how we should structure. The beauty of the department at the time was that it had been around in some way, shape, or form for about 30 years. So it was a very creative team. It was a very tenured team. They had a lot of the things in place that could work from a creative standpoint.  

 

When we all got together as leaders and started talking about it, what we found is there were just pain points. It was like, oh, I wish we could do more of this, or how could we be involved more in the strategy side of things? Or I can’t figure out how to get upstream further in the development process so we could have more impact when we’re building creative pieces.  

 

So, one, it really helps when you have amazingly creative people already in place. Now it was a matter of getting that structure set up. And again, I had played in some of those spaces with the role previous to actually running the creative team. I was involved very closely with the creative team at the time. And again, other companies I had been at where I at least had been involved or had some insight into how they would function.  

 

Robert Berkeley 15:00  

So if you were to look at what you, shall we say, inherited when you started out with the team and where you got to now, what would be the major changes that we’d see looking back? You’ve been there, what, almost ten… over ten years now?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 15:11  

Yeah, yeah. Securian in general and leading the team about seven or eight years—I lose track.  

 

Robert Berkeley 15:17  

What are the… what highlights the major differences then?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 15:19  

So the big thing at that time, which we identified, was that there were a lot of different ways we could go about this, but it was really a focus on operations. So it was putting more structure in place around that creativity. And that was a huge thing that I had learned from my theater background.  

 

So when you think about the world of theater, you’re building this production, and you have this deadline—there’s going to be a date that this show is going to open to the public. So you have to build a process to get there, but you can’t sacrifice creativity.  

 

I often tell this story where I knew people who would just continually tweak and wanted the perfect creative show they ever wanted, and the thing never opened because they were constantly focused on creative. Conversely, I knew people who would work the process perfectly, and if they had a textbook, they could see that this was the way to do it and these were the right choices to make. And it came across as the most distant, with no emotional engagement from the audience.  

 

And the key was always trying to find that balance. So as the creative team, we got together and said, how can we create that structure and those guardrails, but then let the creatives play in that space so they had the chance?  

 

Robert Berkeley 16:31  

So were they aware that they weren’t spending enough time being creative and were actually spending too much time doing things that were distracting from what they were hired to do? Were they coming to you with a… you know… or you all agreed that there was a problem? Or did you have to kind of demonstrate this in some way to them?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 16:49  

I think a number of people said those words exactly—that, hey, we could do more creative stuff. But I’m doing this, and I’m spending time doing this, and I’m doing seven, eight, nine, ten different proofs of a flyer. So how could we get that structure in place?  

 

Or when it came to campaigns, the other thing that we would see was, “Hey, we need your team to build an email.”  

Okay.  

“Now we need them… could you build me a flyer?”  

Okay.  

“Could you now build me a… I need a brochure and a webpage.”  

 

We’d be like, hold on, hold on. What are you doing here? Are you building a campaign?  

“Well, yeah.”  

Oh my gosh. Get us involved in the campaign part of it.  

 

The team recognized that and said if we were involved and we were partnering and collaborating with the different teams, we’d have the opportunity to shape the creative and be part of the creative strategy versus a creative service team or a flyer factory type of thing.  

 

Robert Berkeley 17:39  

So this is part of what we were talking about earlier. This is how you move from being transactional to being more strategic. But how did you go about convincing them—the marketers, the requesters, shall we call them—that they didn’t need to be so prescriptive in what they were asking? And if they were giving maybe a clearer brief, you could bring more to the table. How did you go about convincing them to change their ways? Because they would be very used to kind of saying, I need a flyer, and I need a this, and I need a that, right?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 18:08  

Yes. So this is where we talk about… there’s a couple of cheat codes that we had, like a video game that you could put in there. And it’s like, oh, this helped a lot. One, they centralized the marketing department. So instead of these different teams living off in their different business lines, we were all part of one team.  

 

Robert Berkeley 18:27  

So that… and that upset the process, no doubt, and kind of made people have to reboot.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 18:32  

Yes. And oh, now we have to work together. And oh, now you’re sitting two desks down from me. Oh, yeah, type of thing. So that was a key component. The other one is we all recognized from an enterprise marketing standpoint that we weren’t working together in the best way. And yeah, our in-house team had pain points, but our marketing partners had pain points. They’re like, oh, why does this always happen this way? What else could we do so this is better and easier? So we’re spending more time on creative and not figuring out, wait, who’s doing what? Why am I doing this?  

 

And so we all worked together and literally had numerous workshops about making just decisions. We’re going to review proofs this way.  

 

Robert Berkeley 19:19  

These workshops—are they just with your team, or are you including folks from marketing in this?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 19:23  

You know, we had things we had to figure out on our team—how we work from a review standpoint or whatever it might be. Same with the enterprise marketing department. It’s like, hey, we could work better and know that here we are in the process. This is what’s going to happen next.  

 

And that was the big thing. It always seemed like we were looking at each other going, wait, who does what now? Or what happens next? Now everybody knows. And that was a big part of that shift. And what that allowed is, over time, we could get to the point where we were moving further and further upstream. So we were having those creative strategy conversations while they were building a marketing strategy.  

 

Robert Berkeley 20:00  

Well, I’m going to ask you a question. I need an honest answer for this. Donovan, you said at the beginning that someone told you about how, you know, your life looks like chaos when you’re running it. But you could look back and say there was a clear strategy in this particular area.  

 

You were trying to become more strategic, I suspect, not because of ambition, but because you knew you would bring more to the business as a whole by doing that. Because you had talents that were untapped. Yes. You had racehorses locked in stables, as I often like to say.  

 

How much intentionality was there, though—that these workshops and these initiatives were part of a greater journey and you kind of knew the destination you wanted to reach?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 20:38  

We were very intentional as a leadership team, both on the in-house creative side and the marketing team, to say we all want to be in this better situation, or we want this vision of working and collaborating more. And that was a key part of the upfront discussions.  

 

Though, again, you’re bringing all these different departments together for the first time, and we could have those conversations about—that’s the vision of where we want to go. And so it’s great five years later because I think we got there, or 95% of the way there.  

 

At the time, it was chaos. Not so much like, oh, my gosh, there are things flying all over—what’s the problem? It was just such a shift and change from the way all these teams had worked before, because everybody had a different way of working, and this is where it all came together.  

 

So leadership was a key part of this at the time. When they centralized that marketing department, they brought in Anne McGarry, who’s our leader today—the entire CMO of the organization. And she was amazing. She was also part of this vision and supporting it. I mean, she would hear all the—  

 

Robert Berkeley 21:48  

That’s what I was going to ask. Could you have done this without that kind of senior-level sponsorship? Would it have been possible, or would it have felt like pushing on a bit of string?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 21:56  

It could have been… impossible is a strong word, but it would have been very difficult and perhaps even a longer journey. It’s not that it happened fast. It took time. We’re still evolving and finding better ways to work.  

 

But really, it was about two years to get everything set up and then start when it all started clicking. I remember distinctly—it was a day in late 2019, about two years after we were working on things, where it just started rolling. And that big boulder on the top of the mountain was moving.  

 

And instead of saying, hey, remember, you’ve got to do this. Remember, you’ve got to do this. It was—oh, it just happened. That’s the way it was supposed to be. And now we can focus on that creative and spend time building out that creative part of it.  

 

Robert Berkeley 22:38  

But during that time, that time of kind of, it's not happening, oh, it has happened. You need to keep everyone on track. You've got to keep your staff motivated and say, we're on a journey, we will get there. Kind of have faith. You have to manage upwards and set Ann's expectations as well and say, yeah, we are getting that. Did you do anything kind of formal in terms of presenting development towards this target? Did you define the target? Did you have any measurable way of getting there? Or was it much more kind of soft management that enabled you to get from A to B?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 23:08  

Classic marketing answer. It was both. There was that soft ongoing, hey, we're going to get there, keep doing it. This is it. This is exactly what we're looking for. Way to go, everybody. Let's go get pizza. Let's. We'll do whatever it takes to keep this moving. On the other side of it, we had also started implementing some tools where we could legitimately measure this and start doing comparisons and say, oh, we are. We are absolutely cutting the time in our development. Oh, I can do year-over-year analysis about where our projects are. And some of those busy times hit, oh, it's getting to the point we know where we can accordion some of this. Like, okay, this stuff will just build out this team and they can do it very quickly. Oh, this is a big tier-one type of project. That's going to take time. Okay, we're going to have to have conversations and we'll set this up. And so a little bit of column, a little bit of column B.  

 

Robert Berkeley 24:02  

Quite an interesting transition, Donovan.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 24:04  

It was. And it was. When I look back and it seems like it's destiny and this is this beautiful journey I was on. It all makes sense now. At the time, you're just trying to figure out what's that next thing you can do. How can you. How can we fix this now? Okay, now we got this pain point. We fixed that one, but now we got this one. But over that time, it really got to the point where we saw, hey, we are making a difference. Our creative, as strong as it was, we were having more fun doing it because we could focus on it and take that time to develop that stronger creative.  

 

Robert Berkeley 24:35  

Was that intentional that you would create a certain kind of culture, or was the culture kind of something that evolved along the way? With everybody aligned on the mission?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 24:45  

We knew we wanted to set a culture, so it became very intentional about what we wanted to be. The thing I joke about, we got to have more fun. We're going to have more fun. So we had set some of that and put teams or individuals in place to help build that out. So it wasn't all just coming either from the leaders or the different. The same people all the time. So that was part of it. But then as time goes by, it also evolves on its own. And again, it got easier and easier and easier, and some of those things did just naturally happen. It really helped that you had a vision in place that you could see where you were trying to go and other people were buying into that, which allowed them to start feeling that same way and not living in silos anymore. And that's both at that creative team level and that enterprise marketing level, because you want to make sure it all meshes and it feels the same for everybody. Not exactly the same, but you're all kind of working in that direction.  

 

Robert Berkeley 25:44  

And did you lose people along the way that just wouldn’t get it, couldn’t get it, didn’t want to get it?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 25:49  

I think over time there was just a lot of change going on, and there were some folks that had left in the enterprise marketing department, but it wasn't a lot. We joked a lot. We were like, wow, there's, you know, the team's really still here. We've had more turnover now in the last couple of years. I think just naturally from a career standpoint for a lot of people. But a lot of the key players were in place. Again, cheat code was that there were people across enterprise marketing who all felt that we could work better. So everybody had that vested interest. And Ann McGarry, our leader, was very keen on taking that one thing and making sure this is going to be our focus. Everybody wants to get there. We don’t know exactly how we’re going to land, but everybody wants to work better and collaborate more.  

 

Robert Berkeley 26:34  

That's fabulous. What a great positive attitude to start with and to affect change and carry everyone with you. Did you have to put them on technology platforms as well? I mean, you talked a lot about process. I presume you need to reinforce that process with workflow management, that kind of thing as well.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 26:49  

Yeah. So two years, it was 2018 and 2019. That's where we built out the process. Yes. At the exact same time, we brought in a lot of our technology tools, whether it was the project management system or a digital asset management system. We said all the time we were building the plane while we were flying it because all of our day-to-day work had to keep going, but we had to build out those technology and tools. And we also did a full-on rebrand at the exact same time. So it's possible again. When it was done, it was great because it all came together and it's part of the key, I think, why that 2019 suddenly worked. The brand was there, the platforms were there. We had that vision and culture and got people on the same page. So it was really exciting to see it all. And suddenly you weren't worried about all of these things you used to worry about that took up your time in 2017.  

 

Robert Berkeley 27:42  

So what are the challenges you face now, you know? Or is your work here done, Donovan?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 27:47  

Yeah. After this, everything worked out perfectly, and I think we'll live happily ever after. Not how life works.  

 

Robert Berkeley 27:53  

So where are you going now? Which direction are you headed in?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 27:56  

Where, as a creative team now, one of the really exciting possibilities that we have is we can go back to focusing on creative. And we've talked about that a lot in the last couple of years. It's like, okay, once all this foundational work was moving along—80% of the way there, maybe not done, but, you know, in a good place—it's really about, how do we go back to creative? So now it's looking at the new tools that are available, whether it's artificial intelligence or the different things that the creative platforms are coming out with to allow work to shift, and different people can work on things that they hadn't in the past.  

 

So maybe one might say you had your very structured, "Well, this team always does this, and this team always does that." A lot of times it's driven by tools. However, what we're finding is with the tools changing, these people can do a lot of the same things that other teams can do. So it's figuring out how that works, because at the end of the day, you can come up with these great creative outputs, have different people working on them. So we've really been looking at innovation. How do we find new tools? We obviously say we want to be, on the creative team, the driver of our tools, innovation, creativity, or whatever it might be.  

 

Robert Berkeley 29:09  

You mentioned AI there. You know, is there anything around the corner that you're bracing yourself for, that you think you need to get ready for?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 29:15  

That's been a lot of the big ones. Again, with the process in place, we're involved with that creative development, but we just want to be involved more. So that's what we talk about. It's like, all right, get us up there. How could we build out?  

 

Robert Berkeley 29:26  

So this would mean product development, perhaps.  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 29:28  

We'll see. Or at least having a hand in how we talk about it. Again, our marketing business partners are really great at this work, but we found ourselves sitting at the table more. If they're developing these four or five new products, we're starting to at least be involved with the conversations so we can start thinking about the story.  

 

How do you connect this product to the other one? What is our suite of products? We were having those conversations just a couple of months ago on a few new products that came. And this was—we had said, wow, we've never done this before. This is great that we're even at the table. So just having the conversation.  

 

Robert Berkeley 30:05  

So actually, I had another question that just occurred to me. You've been on this journey for 10 or 11 years at Securian. Anything that you wish you'd known then that you know now, that perhaps would have changed things, done things more quickly, or that you know was an important truth that took you a while to uncover?  

 

Donovan Stohlberg 30:22  

I think I've shared this with others. I needed to probably be prepared for having it take longer than it maybe did. So, you know, you're all excited, and you're like, hey, we can wrap this up in six months. Okay, you're all excited, we can wrap this up in 12 months. Oh no. This will be an ongoing journey. The bulk of the work could be two years, but then you're always going back and revisiting and finding different ways to do things and better ways to do things.  

 

Just having that mindset. And the thing is, numerous people said it, and it was like, okay, yeah, but we could do better than that. And it still just takes time. So to have the patience and the perseverance to continue to know where you're trying to go, but just know it's going to take time to get there.  

 

Robert Berkeley 31:10  

Well, Donovan, thank you for joining us on Inside Jobs. I'd also like to extend my gratitude to IHAF for supporting this EKCS and to you, dear listener. I'm Robert Berkeley, and I look forward very much to our next journey inside the world of in-house agencies.